FIRST IN WAR, PEACE AND PUBLICITY

GEORGE WASHINGTON The Making of an American Symbol. By Barry Schwartz. Illustrated. 250 pp. New York: The Free Press. $22.50.

PERHAPS the most extraordinary of the many remarkable circumstances that surrounded the transformation of a Virginia planter into an object of permanent, national veneration is that it took place during his lifetime, when the man was still present for comparison with his image. Abraham Lincoln was sanctified only after a death that was regarded as a martyrdom, but George Washington while alive was likened to Moses, and there were even those who risked the blasphemy of comparing him to Jesus.

In ''George Washington,'' Barry Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, has set himself the twin tasks of tracing the process through which the man became the symbol and explaining why that image was so widely and enthusiastically received as truth. Biographical studies, he writes, are designed ''to show what Washington did and why he did it,'' but his book concerns itself with ''how Washington became a symbol in the first place, and why he remained one.''

The reconstruction of the sequence - and the analysis of the content - of the anecdotes, speeches and pictures that cohered into the icon of the demigod father of his country is uniformly interesting. Taken singly, the pieces of evidence are familiar, but placed, as they are here, in the context of what Washington's contemporaries believed were the components of public virtue, they are made to speak tellingly. Mr. Schwartz convincingly shows how the temper of the times cooperated with the deeds of the man in the forging of the symbol.

Two circumstances seem especially significant in accounting for the way Washington seized his contemporaries' imaginations. First, his acceptance of the Presidency was in his time the reverse of what accession to that office means today. Fame, the author writes, ''was deemed by Washington's society its highest reward for public virtue.'' As general of the victorious Revolutionary Army, Washington had already reached a peak of fame beyond which it seemed impossible to go. Both he and his countrymen, then, regarded his acceptance of the Presidency as a selfless act, because only a diminution of cherished fame could be anticipated from his entry into the political arena.

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Second, although Washington did battle against both the King of England and kingship itself, his countrymen possessed no model of national leadership other than that of a king. They therefore invested Washington's image with the attributes of royalty even as they followed him in overthrowing monarchy. He filled the role of symbolic king until the people could crown themselves in the Constitution, and in so doing he came to be regarded as the very embodiment of the people. As with the Presidency, so in this role he was finally sanctified by what he relinquished - all temptation to serve as a monarch - rather than by what he acquired. Fame came from achievement, sanctification from sacrifice.

Mr. Schwartz's reconstruction of the symbol would have been enhanced if he had treated Washington's image in connection with parallel phenomena of the period. In this book, Washington stands boldly forth from a muted background in which all others are pretty much of the same size. But there was a middle distance, and a comparison of Washington the symbol with, say, Benjamin Franklin the symbol would yield a subtler picture. Washington was born into wealth, and was aloof and relatively inarticulate - traits associated with aristocracy. Franklin seemed a man of the people: he earned his money, was sociable and constantly chatted in print. But a people bent on an experiment in republicanism cherished the latter while they worshiped the former.

AS I arrived at the close of ''George Washington,'' I became a bit uneasy with Mr. Schwartz's conjectures about why the symbol was so readily taken to be a valid semblance of the man. He appears to endorse a quoted remark of the noted Washington scholar James Flexner's: ''My labors have persuaded me that [ Washington ] became one of the noblest and greatest men who ever lived.'' Mr. Flexner's labors aimed at biography, but in a study of a symbol such an assertion is close to saying that the distance between man and symbol is trifling - and that accordingly, there is no Washington myth greater than the belief that the iconographic grandeur of Washington is a myth.

Free of a desire to debunk, I would point out that many of Washington's contemporaries were acutely aware of a sizable discrepancy between man and symbol. John Adams, for instance, pondered the matter at some length, as if the phenomenon were one of the greatest curiosities of his age. Mr. Schwartz, I feel, might well have paid fuller attention to the reservations held by Washington's more reflective acquaintances.

Larzer Ziff is writing a book on the emergence of literary culture in the United States.

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A version of this review appears in print on September 13, 1987, on Page 7007012 of the National edition with the headline: FIRST IN WAR, PEACE AND PUBLICITY. Today's Paper|Subscribe